Iterated Fact Sheets With R Markdown

Aaron R. Williams (@awunderground)

Urban Institute

Who we are

• 300 researchers
• 50 years

What we do

Our mission is to open minds, shape decisions, and offer solutions through economic and social policy research.

Our objective research helps expand opportunities for all, reduce hardship among the most vulnerable, and strengthen the effectiveness of the public sector.

• Tax Policy Center analysis of candidate tax plans
• Health Policy Center analysis of insurance coverage (King vs. Burwell)
• Pioneers of paired testing and microsimulation

Motivation

Getting information into the right hands is important.

Motivation

Our reports often seem like this.

Motivation

Our attention spans are trained for this.

## [1] "https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/boyfriend.png"

Economic and social policy comic strips

Economic and social policy comic strips Iterated fact sheets and web pages

What does this look like?

1. Targeted and brief

What does this look like?

2. Visually appealing (and branded)

Urban Institute data visualization style guide

What does this look like?

3. Not labor intensive

Examples

• State fact sheets
• County fact sheets
• State fact pages

R Markdown

.Rmd

• Text and images
• Code
• Code output

Three ingredients for fact sheets/pages

1. Data structure
2. Parameterized .Rmd template
3. Iterating script

1) Data structure

• Typically with one row per fact sheet/page

2) Parameterized .Rmd template

Parameters for R Markdown documents are specified in the YAML header:

---
params:
  state: "Alabama"
  year: 2016
---

Parameters can then be used throughout the document:

There were 'r data$fatalities' traffic fatalities in 'r params$state' in 'r params$year'. 

There were 1,038 traffic fatalities in Alabama in 2016.

2) Parameterized .Rmd template

2) Parameterized .Rmd template

• LaTeX for .pdf
• CSS for .html
• CSS for .md

3) Iterating script

# create a data frame with parameters and output file names
runs <- tibble(
  # creates a string with output file names in the form <index>.pdf
  output_file = str_c(index, ".html"),    
  # creates a nested list of parameters for each object in the index
  params = map(index, ~list(state = .))  
)

# iterate render() along the tibble of parameters and file names
runs %>%
  pwalk(rmarkdown::render, input = "template.Rmd", output_dir = "factsheets")

Fact Sheet Tool

Fact Page Tool

Process

1. Why fact sheets?
2. Create a Word template
3. Create and iterate the .Rmd
4. Quality control
5. Create a home for the fact sheets

Data@Urban

• Iterated fact sheets with R Markdown
• Iterated PDFs with R Markdown

Reach out to me

• awilliams@urban.org
• @awunderground

References

NHTSA Traffic Safety Fact Sheets

Texas Statehouse - LoneStarMike

Encyclopedia - WestportWiki